How to create an attractive and efficient homepage?

Your homepage is a bit like the showcase of your website. You visitors need less than 10 seconds to decide whether they will visit your website from your homepage or not. Your homepage plays therefore a key role as far as your visitors’ behaviour is concerned: it must be clear and informative, but also attractive. Here are some tips that will help you create your homepage.

Conceptualisation of your homepage

It may be useful to build your homepage bottom-up instead of top-down. Once you know what you will talk about in the content area of the page, you may find it easier to set the title and write your homepage baseline.

Composition of your homepage

At the top of your homepage, you’ll find the so-called identification zone. There you can write the title of your website (or your company’s name) and the description of your website, your services or your products. This description is also called Baseline.

Your visitors should know right from the start what it is about: 2 or 3 arguments at the top of the page shall convince them to stay on your website. To this end, you should use keywords right from the beginning. For futher information about keywords, you can read our guide How to use keywords in your website?, that will help you choose and place them.

Then you will be able to add more information within the content area of the page, in what we call the Editorial.

Remember to write in a clear and simple way and to space your paragraphs out, so that your text can easily be overlooked on a cursory reading. You can find some tips in our article How to write for the Internet?

You can also add some pictures or a background photo: choose high quality illustrations and be careful in your choice because the impact of an image is immediate and decisive. On SiteW, you can easily add Image blocks allowing you to illustrate your homepage in any way you like.

Tips for creating an effective homepage

Eye-tracking and call-to-actions

You might find it interesting to inform yourself about the general trends as far as eye tracking is concerned. On a webpage, people tend to glance at the top left corner of the screen first, then they look towards the middle of the page. That is where you should put in place your strategy to retain them.

Call-to-actions are buttons which link to other pages of your website (online store, blog…) or to other websites. They must be highlighted because one of the main goal of your homepage is to attract your visitors towards those buttons. Thanks to the Button block of SiteW, you can easily add customized buttons to your website.

Mistakes to avoid

Building a homepage that is either too long or too heavy. It is better not to let your visitors spend too much time on your homepage. Its main role is to lead your visitors to your website.

Not to update your homepage: it is essential to show your visitors that your website is alive, that you are active and keep updating it on a regular basis. You can for example add a “Latest News” section that you’ll regularly feed.

Not to insert a browsing bar: you need to add several links to the main pages of your website (online store, customers’ stories..)

Inserting ads or external links: this may divert your visitors’ attention and may even drive them away!

Offering too many choices to your visitors, you should stay clear and concise in order not to dilute their attention.